President Donald Trump said Friday he supported his wife speaking out about rumors linking her to Jeffrey Epstein – although he might not have handled it the same way and admitted: “I didn’t recommend it.”
The president said in an interview with the New York Times that he knew first lady Melania Trump had wanted to address the speculation for a long time and said that he believed “she had a right to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Trump said, adding, “I didn’t know what the statement was, but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
Asked about her decision to step in front of the cameras at the White House entrance a day earlier, Trump acknowledged some hesitation.
“Would I have done it that way? Perhaps not, perhaps, I don’t know,” he told the Times on Friday.
The first lady’s remarks appeared to have caught much of Washington, D.C., off guard, even surprising some White House officials.
“It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein,” according to the outlet. “Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.”
Trump said his wife had simply grown frustrated with persistent rumors – especially claims that it was Epstein who introduced the couple in the late 1990s – which both Trumps flatly rejected.
“She finds it very insulting,” Trump told the Times of his notoriously private wife, whom he married in 2005, adding, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”